


these ribbons wrap me up

by kathillards



Series: whatever our souls are made of [3]
Category: Power Rangers, Power Rangers Dino Thunder
Genre: Dream Bonds, Multi, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 05:47:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13675503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathillards/pseuds/kathillards
Summary: Her first night away in New York, she dreams of monsters and dinosaurs and gems that glow too bright to be human, too bright to be real. —- dino thunder and the aftermath.





	these ribbons wrap me up

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mcmeekin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mcmeekin/gifts).



> no idea what this is but supercut (2017) by lorde is about the dino thunder ot4 thanks.

**these ribbons wrap me up**

we were wild and fluorescent  
come home to my heart

— _lorde, supercut_

.

Her first night away in New York, she dreams of monsters and dinosaurs and gems that glow too bright to be human, too bright to be real.

She wakes with a gasp, clutching her wrist. The bracelet is still there, gleaming silver in the washed-out darkness of her dorm room. On the other side, her roommate rolls over in her twin bed and snores. Kira looks down and thinks, for one wild, brief moment, that the stone on her wrist is shining yellow.

It’s not. She lays her head back down on the pillow and squeezes her eyes shut and remembers the days when it had and falls into a dream-sleep so deep, she can’t fight her way out of it.

.

She dreams a house that’s black and brown. Inside it, a maze lined with skeletons of ancient beasts. Her footsteps echo on the stairs, heels out-of-place in this world of centuries gone by and animals that walked the Earth millions of years ago.

In the center of the house, she finds a boy kneeling over a silver case. He looks up at her and his eyes are brown and bright and faraway all at once.

“Conner,” she says, the name tripping off her tongue, a word she had known so well just a year ago. “What are you doing here?”

Conner stands, holding the case open. Inside it, there is something sparkling—red and blue and yellow. “What do you think, Kira?”

“Are you a dream?” Kira asks, reaching for him with hesitant fingers, like she’s afraid they might go right through his arm. “Are you really here?”

“Where are you?” he asks, and suddenly his voice is urgent and panicked and pressing in on her from all sides. “Kira, where are you? Where’s Ethan?”

“I don’t know where—”

.

Kira opens her eyes and she’s standing on a cliff above a cave and when she looks down, there are waves rushing up to the edges of the island as if they’re getting ready to swallow it up. The sun is gone but the clouds shine bright, grey and yellow and blinding somehow. She has to cover her eyes.

“Miss me?” says a voice so terribly familiar it sends a shiver down her spine.

Kira turns, and sees Trent. His eyes are glowing. His gem is glowing. He looks like he wants to kill her.

“You’re not Trent,” she says, and snatches at a rock. It goes right through him. “You’re _not_ Trent.”

“Kira!” Someone yells from down below on the beach. “Kira, over here!”

She looks over her shoulder and sees Conner, Ethan, and Trent on the sand, their silhouettes dark against the blue-grey skies. She looks back at the imposter, at the evil white ranger, and he smirks and comes closer.

Kira turns and she jumps. Her eyes close as the world rushes past her, and then in the blink of an eye, someone’s caught her in their arms.

“Careful,” says Trent with that same easy smile, so twisted on his doppelganger’s face. “Wouldn’t wanna lose you now.”

She exhales a breath and throws her arms around him. “Where did he come from?”

“Our nightmares,” says Ethan, turning in a circle. “This place isn’t real.”

“Are you all asleep right now?” Conner rubs his head. “Or did I get high without realizing somehow?”

“You’re not high,” says Trent mildly. “And if you are, don’t tell Dr. O.’

Ethan sits down on the sand and tilts his head up to the sky. His hair is cropped shorter but he’s still wearing blue like the color of the ocean behind him. Kira sits down next to him and he smiles and tugs on one of her curls.

“Your hair’s getting long,” he says.

“I need a haircut,” she agrees. “Is this real?”

“Is anything real?” Conner asks. Trent smacks him on the shoulder and Ethan laughs.

“Who knew Conner would end up being the philosophy major among us?” Ethan teases.

“Hey,” Conner says, stumbling down to the ground besides them. “There are a lot of hot girls who take philosophy classes. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

“You did not just say that for real,” Trent sighs deeply and sinks down next to Kira. He nudges her in the shoulder and says, “So, how’s New York?”

The sky turns red, then black above them. If this is a dream, she thinks she might never want to wake up. Lost, hazy days fade into the horizon and their laughter is the last thing she hears before her eyes open again.

.

She gets sick halfway into her first finals week at NYU and spends a class period lying in bed drinking hot soup from the cafeteria and praying for her nose to get unclogged.

It’s these days, these utterly normal hours, that she aches the most inside, remembering when she had been superhuman, how she’d never gotten sick in senior year because of a gemstone on her wrist strengthening all her systems till she was something more than a lonely college student lost in New York City.

Ethan calls her up and the first thing he asks is, “Are you sick?”

“How’d you know?”

“I just got nauseous randomly,” he says, and she can practically hear the face he’s making. “Remember how in high school, that time Conner got really badly injured in a fight and for weeks afterward you and I would feel, like, phantom pains in our ribs?”

Kira frowns, stares up at her dusty dorm ceiling, misses the adrenaline rush of the fight so much she thinks she might burst from it. “You think that’s happening again?”

“I don’t know if it ever stopped,” Ethan admits. “I think the gems did something weird, way back when.”

She presses a hand to her chest to stop the cough that’s trying to crawl its way out. “Is that such a bad thing?”

Ethan is silent for a long moment. “Maybe not.”

.

She dreams in white and gold and ends up in a high school football field where all the bleachers are empty except one.

“Never thought we’d end up back here,” Trent says, leaning over the railing to smile down at her. “Even if it’s just in our dreams.”

“We’ll always have high school, right?” Kira smiles and reaches up, standing on her tiptoes to reach him so they can kiss. “I miss this.”

“I keep waiting… for the other shoe to drop,” he admits, hands framing her face and brushing her hair out of her eyes. “There has to be a downside to these dreams. A dark side. Like when you saw that other me—”

“Don’t.” Kira shivers at the memory of Trent with nothing in his eyes, no fear and no love. “Don’t mention him. If he never comes back, it’ll be too soon.”

“I know.” Trent exhales, his breath soft over her cheeks. “God, I know. I keep dreaming of accidentally hurting one of you—it’s gotten worse since we graduated, I think. Since the gems stopped working.”

“Maybe this is the reprieve,” she suggests, and kisses him again. “Maybe this is our real victory.”

.

She sends Dr. O an email that just asks ‘Have you had any weird gem-related dreams?’. He sends her back a whole pdf on his and Mercer’s research into the bonding abilities and properties of the dino gems.

Kira texts Conner: _do u think we’ll ever be normal?_

Conner: _dunno. what’s normal?_

_Like not having freaky dreams and getting sick randomly and missing the smell of the fight. Rmr how tyrannodrones smell?_

She can almost hear him snort. _they’re disgusting. do you really wanna be normal?_

Kira looks up when her roommate enters, balancing her Starbucks order on top of her biochem textbooks, laughing on the phone to her long-distance boyfriend and not even taking a moment to pause and look around.

She thinks about the fighting, the way her body would move, perfectly in sync with the others, thinks about a yellow pterodactyl zord that took her flying through the skies. Thinks about being something so otherworldly, so unimaginable, that she can’t fathom that girl, who rode dinosaurs and fought monsters, sitting in a college dorm and studying for a test.

She thinks about Conner and Ethan and Trent. Thinks about how often she dreams of them, how some of the dreams are real and some of them aren’t. Thinks about the nightmares and the frantic breathing and the feeling of something lurking in the darkness.

At her wrist, the yellow gem lies silent.

_Probably not. but sometimes I still wish…_


End file.
